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and the callouses on their hands. They performed the harsh and low paying tasks and it was accepted as right and proper that as inferiors, they should be treated as inferiors and they were.

In May, 1968, time caught up with Bellamy. During a hearing in Montgomery, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights listened to testimony about this small unincorporated settlement, set up close to the Mississippi border in Alabama's Black Belt, that showed just how little it had changed over the years. When Bellamy was established by the Allison Lumber Company the only way in or out was by rail and while a two-lane asphalt highway later linked Bellamy to the outside, the testimony indicated it was almost as if the highway had never been built and time had stood still. The civil rights movement had washed through Selma to the east and touched Meridian to the west, but Bellamy remained as it had always been.

Black workers were still scrunched down at the lower end of the skill ladder and the pay scale, their houses were still pitiful when compared to those occupied by whites, their school remained an abomination, and not infrequently they were in debt up to their eyeballs to the single store in Bellamy. With the sawmill as the only employer, what opportunity existed for a young black man in Bellamy was the opportunity to get out.

A company town though it was, Bellamy was not a small operation. It housed the largest southern pine mill east of the Mississippi River and was owned by the New York based American Can Company, a multimillion dollar government contractor whose sales in 1968 were over a billion and a half dollars. The mill's work force numbered 334 with blacks representing 78 percent of the total. While there was no requirement that workers and their families had to live in the settlement, some 1,000 did with blacks in the majority. American Can purchased the approximately 125,000 acres of timber land, the sawmill and associated housing from the Allison Lumber Company in 1960, and in 1968 the place was still segregated. An invisible line was drawn through Bellamy, separating the white from the black. All of the homes the company rented to white workers were substantial dwellings with bathrooms and running water, while only eight of the homes rented to blacks had similar facilities. If there were not separate jobs for black and white, as the company claimed, the fact was that the average black made substantially less than the average white, the only dark face in the company office be

longed to an office boy-an adult well past the age of even late adolescence—and it was not until two weeks before the Commission hearing that two blacks were finally promoted to supervisory positions in the plant.

American Can did not establish the racial patterns in Bellamy, but until 1968 it had done little to break them. Similarly, the Federal establishment had moved in snail-like fashion. The General Services Administration (GSA) with a more than $1 million contract with American Can had never conducted a compliance review. Speaking for GSA, George Dorsey, Director, Civil Rights Program Policy Staff, told the Commission at the Montgomery hearing:

"I was not aware officially of the housing situation (in Bellamy) until I read it in this morning's paper about the testimony last night. Although I had heard it men tioned casually in the office, I was not aware of it otherwise."

In his testimony, Owen Hanson, Resident Manager, Alabama Operations, American Can, said this. "The problems we have been living with here have been gradually evolving; we are trying to formulate a plan so that we can do what has to be done and at the same time treat our employees fully as fairly as possible."

Shortly after the hearing changes did begin to occur in Bellamy, changes that many of the long time residents had little cause to believe would ever take place. Whether the hearing produced the changes or whether they would have occurred on their own is a matter that can be speculated on, but occur they did and Bellamy revisited is not the Bellamy of the first time around.

In late July of 1968, American Can submitted a proposed affirmative action program to the General Services Administration dealing with the disposal of company housing, the creation of a cooperative store and credit union, and promising company cooperation in the establishment of a local government for Bellamy. With some amending, the proposal was accepted by GSA as constituting compliance with Executive Order 11246 and implementing regulations. GSA also warned that failure to take aggressive action to assure early and complete implementation of the ap proved plans might result in termination of any or all outstanding contracts.

Even while the hearing was still in progress, however, the company had begun to move toward divesting itself of ownership of the houses on which it had been losing, according to its records, between $77,000 and $80,000 a year. Discussions opened with government

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officials over methods by which the company could dispose of the housing. Several approaches were proposed, including competitive bidding and a lottery, before the solution of deeding the homes and land for $1 to three classes of individuals employees, retired employees, widows of employees-was settled upon and accepted by GSA. The Department of Justice and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, who were also involved in the discussions, officially neither rejected nor accepted the plan, while the Commission on Civil Rights rejected it on the basis that the gift of houses represented a form of compensation that discriminated against most blacks.

The black homes had an average value of $1,200 while the white homes were valued at $6,000. While both whites and blacks were given homes for token payments, what most of the blacks received was much less on the basis of quality and value-than what white workers received.

As a part of its plan, American Can offered $500, to be expended on home improvements, to all of the new homeowners who had been paying $20 or less a month in rent. Since only those homes with bathrooms rented for $20 or more, the proviso restricted the list of eligibles to black families.

At the time of the transfer, October 1969, 139 of the company homes were occupied by blacks, 37 by whites, and five homes previously occupied by whites were vacant. These empty houses were offered to a list of the most senior black employees in exchange for their older homes, and five out of the 13 approached agreed to break Bellamy's color line. Additionally, two model homes were built in formerly all-white sections at a total cost of $14,600 and turned over to black employees in exchange for their old homes. Since then eight of the black workers have qualified for FHA loans to build new homes, two of them to be located in formerly white neighborhoods, and several others are in the process of receiving FHA approval. American Can is actually building the homes, resulting in a savings on contruction costs.

The sweet smell of fresh and available money brought a swarm of salesmen to Bellamy all eager to cash in on the bonanza of new opportunity. In the first few weeks after the transfer, 25 of the new home owners had signed up with a single firm for home improvements, primarily indoor plumbing. The $500 from the company, however, was only a start with each of the

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final bills running up to several thousand dollars. Then to add a further headache, not long after work began on the alterations, the new home owners began to grumble that they were being overcharged for inferior work.

By this time the improvement firm had discounted the notes to a Birmingham bank, and the home owners turned to plant management for assistance. The Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP was contacted and it brought in an independent black contractor who examined the work that had been done and gave what he considered a fair estimate of what it should have cost. The bank and the improvement firm agreed to accept this evaluation and the net reduction to the homeowners was approximately 10 percent. A more prudent approach on the part of the black homeowners toward improvements on their properties was evident after this first experience with salesmen, and American Can also arranged with Farmers Home Administration to send in representatives to explain how improvements could be financed through government programs, even before the salesmen began their pitches.

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been a minor one. Barnes and a friend, Frank Fenderson, were the source of much of the information about Bellamy at the Montgomery hearing, with Barnes reaching a level of eloquence when he described what his people wanted.

"I know they want improvement. I talk with some of them in the last week and they say they want improvement, they want restroom in the house, different things. They want to beautify their houses, and different things. If they'd get an opportunity, they want it too. We want some of the same things that the white have."

Since the hearing, Fenderson has left Bellamy and Barnes no longer works for the company. On June 16, 1969, a day after he had been assigned a new job, Barnes called in ill and said he was going to see an eye doctor. He worked for the last time on June 25th and then began a series of communications by letter, phone, and in person between Barnes and company officials. The company asserts that Barnes was given the opportunity to return to work, and indeed was offered training as a lumber grader, a position not previously held by a black person. Barnes failed, however, to keep a number of promises he made to return, the company says. Barnes contends he was ill during the period, while American Can says he was working in Whitfield while all this was going on. Finally, the company ordered him to report for duty on August 13th with medical evidence of the disability that kept him from work. Barnes claims that despite his illness, he could not produce the type of records the company demanded and he accepted the last communication as his dismissal.

Barnes gives the impression of accepting his severance with complete equanimity that leaves no room for rancor or even regret that 20 years and more on the job have been washed down the drain. One senses in this approach something of the attitude that came over many of the vigorous leaders of the southern civil rights movements in the early 60's when after months of continued pressures and frustrations they reached a point where it became almost impossible for them to be concerned about jobs, families, or the other material things that figure so prominently in the lives of other people. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the person's role in the movement became everything thus making it possible for them to persist in the pursuit of goals they knew in their own minds were right, no matter what the cost to themselves.

When Barnes says, in a matter of fact voice, “after

the hearing, things were changing so fast that some of the whites said they were going to kill me if Negroes moved next door to them," it isn't easy to dismiss the words, not when set against the number of times such threats have been carried out.

Violence, however, has not occurred in Bellamy and what changes have taken place seem to have been at least on the surface, accepted in good grace.

The company says this, the people of Bellamy say this, and it has to be believed. There was an admitted reluctance on the part of some of the black people to move into the formerly all-white section of Bellamy. It would be expecting too much to believe that it could have been otherwise, not after so many years of existing in and being a part of a tightly segregated community.

Percy Johnson, who has spent almost all of his 62 years in Bellamy, is the head of one of the black households to move into the all-white section. The dwelling he received was one of the two model homes, and even with the conveniences it offered, Mr. Johnson did some soul searching before he agreed to the move. "I had the best house in town as far as colored people are concerned and I just didn't want to live with them (the whites) but it's working out okay. Now the people (once again the whites) laugh and talk with you and try to get you like you ought to be."

From this conversation and others with blacks who have moved into the once all-white sections, integration can be said to be working. And yet, behind the words, there is a certain degree of wariness; a reluctance to seek friends among the new neighbors, and perhaps too this is a legacy of a segregated past, not quickly undone.

Essentially, Bellamy is an uncomplicated and unexciting place in which to live. There's the mill, the store, a gas station, the school, a post office, and the homes. There is little to do except work and go home, and this, combined with limited job opportunities, has resulted in a visible shortage of young adults. Only recently have the blacks who have remained been given anything approaching an equal opportunity for job advancement. Where, until shortly before the hearing, there were no black foremen, there is now one, and six blacks have been designated assistant foremen and one young woman has been employed in the office as a receptionist. In a 6-month period, from March 1969 to September, 10 of the 12 promotions made at the mill went to blacks.

For most of the black workers, however, the new job

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